Formatting Dates With awk

I’m a huge sci-fi fan (big surprise there) but can’t seem to be able to keep up with TV schedules that well.  Particularly because I tend to save up TV over a week (or more) and then catch up later.  Which means I either need to set the DVR or remember to source content from elsewhere.  I used to literally write episode airings on a paper calendar, but that got annoying to keep up with and then I’d spill coffee on it or lose it.  Yes, yes, I know the DVR can do recurring recordings, but I tend to lose track after a few weeks and then wonder what’s new, what’s a rerun, or what aired during a huge thunderstorm and we either lost signal or got preempted by weather coverage.

I thought about email reminders, but that gets spammy and doesn’t really fit my requirements.  Local calendars wouldn’t really work, as I often move between computers and don’t want to fool with exporting/importing.  Not to mention others would like to access the schedule.  But the Google based calendar would be cumbersome and entirely too time consuming for this purpose.  A text file hosted on my XS would be perfect.

Eventually what I figured out I wanted was to create a personalized TV schedule in a flat text file in a data format that awk could parse.

OK, easy enough.  I looked up schedules on Wikipedia and did up something that looks like this (obviously this is a truncated version):

Yeah, I manually entered all that, but sorting stuff before editing, depending on what I’m doing, makes data entry a breeze.

To sort by date:

cp tv-listings.txt tv-listings.bak
sort tv-listings.bak > tv-listings.txt

To sort by show name:

cp tv-listings.txt tv-listings.bak
sort -t: -k2 tv-listings.bak > tv-listings.txt

Now, sorted by date would probably be good enough.  But I wanted something a little more human readable.  Enter awk.

Since the XS has Apache, it would be nice for my friends and me to be able to access my TV schedule from anywhere.  I’m not gonna mess around with html, though.  A simple .txt is fine.

The difficult part was figuring out how to make awk parse the date.  To generate a text file that looks like this and upload it to my XS…

…here’s the simple bash script I used:

#!/bin/bash

FILE=tv-listings.txt

# Backup master tv listings file just in case

cp $FILE $FILE.bak
sort $FILE.bak > $FILE

awk ‘BEGIN{FS=”:”}
{
 cmd=”date +”%b %d %a” –date=47″$1″47″
 cmd | getline day
 close(cmd)
 print day, $2, $3, $4
}’ $FILE > current-listings.txt

scp current-listings.txt myserver:/var/www/html/anna

Now, the fun part about this line

cmd=”date +”%b %d %a” –date=47″$1″47″

Is that you can edit the date format any way you like.  For example, if I format that line to look like so:

cmd=”date +”%B %d %A” –date=47″$1″47″

It generates this file:

Or I could move the date fields around.  This:

cmd=”date +”%A %d %B” –date=47″$1″47″

Gives me this:

Obviously this could be a lot more sophisticated and/or automated, but it only takes me a few minutes a week to maintain.  And it should make keeping up with shows a little easier.

And even more obviously, there are better things to do with something like this.  Like if you have “real life” things, such as children’s soccer games, recitals, dentist appointments, etc.

Anyway, for recurring stuff that you don’t necessarily want or need a fancy calendar application or notification system for, this might fit the bill.  And awk lets you format the date in all kinds of pretty ways!